18 x x PROFILES x x x THIR. TY-FIVE YEAR.S OF BALZAC ì\ BO UT ten years ago, a sister- ..r-l.. in-law of \Villiam H. Royce poin ted to a bust in the French room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and exclaimed, "It's Royce!" She was wrong, however. It was a bust of Balzac by Rodin. Since that time, many have noticed the resemblance of Royce to the great French novelist. It is not un usual for a person con versing wIth Royce to ask suddenly, "Has any- body ever told you that you are the image of Honoré de Balzac?" Royce happens to be a world-famous authorIty on Balzac. For thirty-fi ve years, starting as a nineteen-year-old clerk in a bookstore, he has devoted his leisure to Balzacian studies. His re- sem blance to Balzac suggests a parallel to Hawthorne's tale of the Great Stone Face, which gradually impressed its image on the man who contemplated it for a lifetime. Balzac's fame as a novelist and his strange history have made him the subject of more investigation than any other man of letters of the past hundred years. Nobody ever had more secrets than he. No man ever left behInd so many mysteries and con- troverSIes to fascinate the literary his- torians. Today, eighty-three years after his death, scholars are still winning honors and degrees by working on scandals which any good Broadway columnist, had he lived in that time, would have cleared up within a few days. Balzac was a habitual disap- pearer, sometimes dropping out of sight for months, and learned men are still trying to fill in these blanks in his story. In his twenties, Balzac wrote under six or seven assumed names, and eminent Balzacians are still toiling to identify these potboilers. Many of the two thousand major characters in his novels were taken from life; the search for the originals and the process of weeding out the impostors from the originals are still keeping profes- sors and students occupied in ten or eleven countries. Balzac's contempo- raries differed widely in their reports of him. Lamartine said that Balzac spoiled his teeth by smoking too much; Gautier said that he never smoked. \Vhether he was a light eater or a heavy eater is still debated. Cameron Rogers in "Oh Splendid Appetite!" celebrated Balzac as a glutton; others assert that he was abstemious and that the tradi- tion of his gormandizing feats was started by a dyspeptic friend named Edmond \Verdet who regarded a mod- erate dinner as a mess for a Cyclops. .IA. map of Balzac's love life would be emblazoned with rosy dots from the Ukraine to Italy, but he managed his affairs with such su- perb discretion that some of his acquaintances sus- pected him of heing an anchorite. According to Gautier, Balzac's recipe for a chi e vi n g literary heights was unflinching celibacy; but the scholar- ship of the past three- quarters of a century has awarded him seven major mistresses and a legion of minor ones. YCE'S special contrihutions to Bal- zac lore have been the discovery of forgotten or anonymous stories, ar- ticles, and other writings of Balzac and the organization of all existing data into a monumental six-volume bibliography now in process of publica- tion by the University of Chicago. His achievement in making himself one of the greatest Balzac authorities is espe- cially remarkable for two reasons: he does not speak French readily and he has never been to France. Working mainly in his study in Brooklyn, he has added approximately seventy publica- tions to the list of Balzac's known works, has discovered sixty titles of works projected by Balzac and never executed, has identified twenty pre- viously unknown originals of Balzac's characters, and has increased Balzac's known seraglio by one ma j or mistress. In their long association, Royce has con tracted several habits from Balzac. \'Then working late at night or early in the morning, he combats fatigue, as Balzac did, by taking snuff, smoking Latakia tobacco, and drinking enor- mous quantities of coffee. These are not mere whims or idol-worshipping ceremonies on the part of Royce; they are practices which he adopted from Balzac after testing them and convinc- ing himself that they were sound. Nothing, according to Royce, refreshes the jaded intellect like snuff. He agrees with the authorities who assert that the APRIL I, 19 .3 Tif T illia11z H. Royce wit, lucidity, and hrilliance of the great eighteenth-century writers was based on their incessant use of this hrain tonic. He believes that Napoleon would have been impossible without snuff, and that Balzac might have been less prodigious except for his violent use of this genius- nursing substance. The question whether Balzac was a smoker \-vas settled by Royce through the discovery that the novelist had twice written for shipments of to- bacco grown at Latakia in Syria. On reading those letters about twenty years ago, Royce provided himself with a store of Latakia. The first few puffs of his pipe eXplained to Royce another of the secrets of Balzac's fame; the Latakia, Royce found, had an unmistakable effect in clearing and invigorating the intellect. Balzac's ad- diction to coffee is, of course, notorious. "Coffee," he said in his preface to Bril- l S ., " Ph . I . d G ^ " at- avarIn s YSIO ogle u out, "makes ideas rise up in battalions." One day each month, Balzac would visit three different parts of Paris, buying coffee from Martinique at one place, coffee from Bourbon (Réunion Island) at another, and Mocha at a third. These he would blend and brew for himself. The disappearance of Bourbon coffe from the market has prevented Royce from reproducing the Balzac brand, but he consumes strong black coffee in Balzacian quantities. It was Balzac's custom to go to bed at six P.M., arise at midnight, and write for a long stretch, sometimes sixteen or eighteen hours, sustaine chiefi y by black